Rachel Reid never had any intent behind making Shane a person of color and this passage below is the biggest proof of that:
“Ilya glanced at the end of the table, where Shane was sitting.As Ilya had suspected, Shane looked confused and uncomfortable. Hockey had never made Shane sad for a minute of his life. Ilya couldn't pretend to know how it felt to be let down by the game he loved-not in the way Max or Ryan had been-but he was more aware of hockey'sflaws than Shane was. He'd been paying more attention, over the past few years, to the darker side of his sport.”
More on why Rachel Reid’s racial bias becomes extremely evident throughout Shane’s arc below the cut.
So while writing a fic where Shane talks to his son about how hockey is hard for people that look like them and how it’s okay if he doesn’t want to play hockey because of it, I recalled a few lines in The Long Game that don’t sit right with me.
I have talked about how Rachel Reid’s refusal to engage with white supremacy as a core problem in hockey harms her analysis of the other problems that are present in hockey.
But this to me sits differently to that.
This to me is the clearest evidence that not a lick of thought was put into writing Shane as a biracial Asian man in a sport that is dominated by white people and a white supremacist culture to its core. It is also pretty clear that she doesn’t think much of Shane with regards to his character motivations in the Long Game.
So let’s unpack this:
Rachel Reid, at least from Ilya’s point of view has stated that Shane looks *confused* and uncomfortable by discussion of hockey’s flaws. I’ll give you uncomfortable since it’s always uncomfortable when flaws in a thing you love as much as Shane loves hockey are brought up. But confused?
You are going to sit here and tell me a gay, autistic, biracial Asian man who has played hockey his entire life is unaware as to why some hockey players hate the institution? As if this isn’t the same institution that is the reason Shane can’t be public with the man he loves. As if he wasn’t an Asian child playing hockey in Canada. And Asian child that was good at hockey.
To make my points in this, I will be using examples from prior to 2020 only despite, with an April 2022 release date, the long game manuscript being due April 2021 at the latest, which was after the hockey world had started reckoning with race.
There is extensive documentation of racism including anti Asian racism in Canadian Hockey that spans decades.
But let’s get more specific and talk about specific hockey players who have been open about their experiences:
Larry Kwong is the first person of Asian descent to be drafted and play in the National Hockey League. His debut season was in 1948 and he spent only 60 seconds on the ice. This was his only NHL game. Kwong is known for breaking the color barrier in ice hockey, despite First Nations players having played in the NHL first. I, personally, do not known enough First Nations history to comment on why that is.
In November 2019, a Calgary Flames coach resigned for being racially abusive to his players.
It took until 2019 for the NHL to implement stricter consequences for slurs.
A 13 year old Black child was racially abused by the opposing team and their fan, also in 2019.
Val James spoke about his experiences of racism in 2015.
Of the 8676 men that have played in the NHL, only 45 of them have identified as Asian. For the math challenged, that is 0.5% of total NHL players and many of these men are from recent years.
Shane is a minority (Asian) within a minority (people of color) in a sport that is dominated by white people.
There is zero, zero, zero chance that an Asian child makes it through peewee hockey without at least one experience of racism directed at them (or their parents). There is zero chance that that same child who turns out to be very good at hockey also makes it through triple A, major juniors, and all the way into the NHL without a single hockey related incident making a biracial Asian child sad.
Sidney Crosby has talked about adults encouraging their children to make dirty hits on him because he was very good at hockey.
An asian child in that same set of circumstances is in for a worse fate than Crosby because they are Asian and they are good at a sport that racist white Canadians tie to their national identity. Whatever abuse Sidney Crosby, who Shane is based partly off of, double it and give it to Shane and you might get close to how he was treated as a child.
Shane would’ve been exposed to the worst of hockey’s racism probably from the moment that anyone realized how good he was. He’s always been the best everywhere he’s played which means he’s always been outperforming white children which means he’s always been exposed to the worst racism that Canadian hockey culture has to offer.
We know this because white kids in hockey get bullied for being good. We know this because children of color in hockey get bullied for being not white.
And Shane is BOTH!!!!!
Even removing hockey culture, do you not know that Asian children experience racism and prejudice in Canada, that they experience at school and on the playground and at the park and at summer camp, why the fuck wouldn’t it be present in hockey when it’s the same damn kids? It is the “Canadians are too progressive to be racist!” bullshit that is their national image because they’re marginally better than their neighbors to the south but it doesn’t mean that racism doesn’t exist.
The idea that a person of color doesn’t know how bad hockey culture can be is absurd. The idea that said person’s white immigrant partner is somehow more aware of hockey’s flaws than a person of color is absurd. The idea that a person of color is totally unaware and even confused by discussion of hockey’s flaws is so difficult to imagine that it’s laughable.
The idea that hockey has never made Shane sad is functionally impossible. It relies on a history of Canada that doesn’t exist, and certainly one that doesn’t exist in the GCU universe seeing as Scott’s coach talks about the racism he faced and that doesn’t all go away in a few decades, especially in an organization so reticent to change as the NHL.
Like, be so forreal, a biracial Asian man in a league that has had less than 45 Asian players total, who billeted and played hockey in a majority white city, who grew up playing hockey in Canada and then joined a league with a racism problem that is documented by the book has zero awareness of the flaws of hockey?
Are you seriously going to try and sell me on that?
The only logical explanation is that Rachel Reid wasn’t writing Shane as a person of color. She was writing him from her white lens without a lick of regard to the ethnic background she gave him and it makes Shane’s character lack so much dimension and depth in the long game.
Shane is the person who doesn’t want to come out for no reason or the one who is so attached to his terrible team and teammates that he doesn’t notice hockey’s flaws instead of him being one of literally probably 5 Asian men in a league that starts the racial abuse at peewee and continues into the big leagues who has to manage being Asian and gay and dating his rival and all the implications that come with it.
You can’t both make Shane an Asian man in hockey and make him totally oblivious to hockey’s flaws.
You simply can’t.
